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Celebrating a Living Legacy

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Jeff Haessler

•

March 6, 2017

About 500 people packed the Cable Center last Saturday night. Some were lawyers, some were students, many were University of Denver Sturm College of Law alumni. The crowd was made up of people from all over the world. For all their diverse backgrounds, they had one thing in common: Professor Ved Nanda.

The University celebrated Nanda’s 50 Years of teaching at DU.

Former trustee and DU alumna Maria Guajardo (MA ’85, PhD ’88) said she didn’t want to miss this momentous occasion. “I am here to celebrate Ved’s accomplishments. Fifty years is absolutely stellar. I flew in from Tokyo to be here today.”

David Schollenberger (JD, MBA ’82), a former student of Nanda’s, is still in awe of his lifelong teacher. “I flew over from London just for this. He’s an amazing man and still going strong.”

Nanda came to the University of Denver in 1965. The law school’s dean at that time, Bob Yegge, wanted to build some new programs, and the law and society movement was one of them. Nanda put international law and the study of human rights on the map.

“Ved brought not only international law but international law and policy and the sense of how do we teach the world that international law is important and that it has a major impact on our world,” explains Douglas Scrivner, chair of the DU Board of Trustees.

The Ved Nanda Center for International and Comparative Law was founded ten years ago at Nanda’s 40th anniversary celebration, thanks to a generous $1 million gift by Doug and Mary Scrivner.

The mission of the Nanda Center is to promote international law scholarship. It does so by hosting signature programs like the Sutton Colloquium on International Law. At the event, guests and participants learned that Nanda’s vision will continue through the creation of new initiatives such as the Business and Human Rights and Young Legal Scholars program for developing countries.